Television

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

California governor granting clemency at record pace

Twenty killers serving life sentences that were recently
commuted by California Gov. Jerry Brown, reported the Washington Post. With barely four months left in
office, California’s longest-serving governor is granting forgiveness to record
numbers of criminals.

Brown has handed out more than 1,100 pardons benefiting a
wide array of individuals, including those convicted of dealing drugs, driving
while intoxicated and forgery. The tally is staggeringly greater than the
totals of his immediate predecessors. Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger granted
15 pardons, and Democrat Gray Davis ended with zero.

Perhaps more remarkable are the commutations, which grant
parole hearings to — and often spell early release for — criminals who
previously may have had no chance of ever being paroled. Brown has issued 82 in
the past seven years, far more than any California governor since at least the
1940s. Criminal justice reformers nationwide applaud him. Victims rights
advocates are livid.

“2018 is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said Patricia
Wenskunas, founder and chief executive of the Crime Survivors Resource Center.
“The sad reality is, California is not a victim-friendly state. It’s an
offender-friendly state.”

California was once a leader in tough-on-crime policies,
which turned its prisons into inmate warehouses. Then in 2011, the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled that
overcrowding in the state’s prison system amounted to cruel and unusual
punishment. The decision accelerated a wave of legal reforms that have reduced
the prison population by 25
percent. About 115,000 inmates remain locked up in the state’s 33
facilities. The vast majority of those released to date have been nonviolent
offenders.

Brown’s commutations for the 20 murder convicts were tucked
into a larger batch
of pardons and commutations that he handed out last month. The
designation isn’t synonymous with freedom but amounts to a reduction of an
original sentence. For these 20 men and women, most of whom had been sentenced
to life in prison with no possibility of parole, it means they’ll be granted a
hearing.

The governor sees his action not as a sign of lenience so
much as a societal course correction. “There has been an overshoot in the time
many people expect [criminals] to be locked up in a cage or cell,” he said in
an interview.

In the 1970s, those convicted of first-degree murder tended
to serve about a decade for their crimes, he noted; now it isn’t unusual for
such sentences to span a half-century. Some 5,000 prisoners today are serving
life sentences without parole in California.

About Matt

An analysis of crime and punishment from the perspective of a former prosecutor and current criminal justice practitioner.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or postions of any county, state or federal agency.